These gorgeously designed environmental sensors hope to make your workplace and domestic dwelling happier and healthier.

What’s the air quality like in your office right now? What about the light or humidity? You probably have no idea, and there’s probably no way to find out. It’s a strange dichotomy: You can look up all of this information about any outdoor environment halfway across the world, instantly, but you can’t track what’s directly around you every single day.

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This is precisely the oddity that CubeSensors hope to rectify. They’re networked, tabletop sensors that track temperature, noise, light, humidity, barometric pressure, and air quality. The information is sent to a base station, which beams the information into the cloud (and your phone). So with a button press, you can get a score, much like Nike Fuel, of the environment around you.

“You can act on something only when you can measure it,” co-founder Ales Spetic explains. “People adapt to the conditions they are in, however, their stress level and productivity adjust accordingly. For example, if you work in a loud environment, your stress level increases and you notice that only in the long run. Similarly, it’s quite often that we work in an office when it gets darker outside and we forgot to switch on the light until we feel the strain on our eyes.”

In other words, CubeSensors actively track all of those minutia that can affect our indoor health and comfort. And via an app, they can alert us whenever our environment subtly reinforces workplace or domestic unhappiness.

But the most impressive part of the CubeSensors has to be their cutting-edge industrial design. They’re cloud-connected electronics with no on/off switches! Instead, the cubes activate when they’re in range of a connected base station. And via what’s apparently some sort of incredible power management, they operate off rechargeable internal batteries for up to two months at a time.

That battery life is a remarkable achievement, approaching the sort of life cycles our connected devices need as we evolve into an Internet of things. Because until all of our smart devices have the omnipresent charge of a TV remote, we simply can’t afford to have all that many smart devices.

About the author

Mark Wilson is a senior writer at Fast Company who has written about design, technology, and culture for almost 15 years. His work has appeared at Gizmodo, Kotaku, PopMech, PopSci, Esquire, American Photo and Lucky Peach